Following the success of Handheld Press's 2019 best-selling anthology Women's Weird, Women's Weird 2 will be published alongside James Machin's anthology of classic British Weird fiction, British Weird. Women's Weird 2 contains thirteen remarkably chilling stories originally published from 1891 to 1937, by women authors from the USA, Canada, the UK, India and Australia. The stories and authors are: 1.Edith Stewart Drewry 'A Twin Identity' (1891) combines an early woman detective with ghostly horror 2.Lettice Galbraith, 'The Blue Room' (1897): an incubus and an educated young woman 3.Sarah Orne Jewett 'The Green Bowl' (1901), in which a bowl must be handed down to the next person who sees it 4.Barbara Baynton 'A Dreamer' (1902) sees a midnight journey through the Australian bush. 5.Mary Wilkins Freeman 'The Hall Bedroom' (1905), in which lodgers in this particular bedroom dream that they walk in strange places 6.Katherine Mansfield 'The House' (1912): a young woman caught in a rainstorm populates her dream home with a fantasy life 7.Bithia Mary Croker 'The Red Bungalow' (1919) a classic of Indian horror by a prolific and highly regarded Irish novelist 8.Bessie Kyffin-Taylor 'Outside the House' (1920) in which terrifying haunted garden keeps its owners trapped. 9.Marjorie Bowen 'Florence Flannery' (1924) makes a promise that will be called for centuries later. 10.Helen Simpson 'Young Magic' (1925): a forgotten author writes powerfully about the acquisition of witchcraft skills 11.L M Montgomery 'The House Party at Smoky Island' 1935); a beautifully handled 1930s ghost story, no red pigtails in sight. 12.Mary Elizabeth Counselman 'The Black Stone Statue' (1937) in which a jelly-like alien turns everything it touches to stone. 13.Stella Gibbons 'Roaring Tower' an unusually positive and benevolent monster in captivity.
About the Author: Melissa Edmundson researches and publishes on nineteenth and early twentieth-century British women writers, with a particular interest in women's supernatural fiction. She is the editor of a 2011 critical edition of Alice Perrin's East of Suez (1901), and author of Women's Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Wales Press, 2013) and Women's Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930: Haunted Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She edited Avenging Angels: Ghost Stories by Victorian Women Writers (Victorian Secrets, 2018).